Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Monday, January 25, 2010

"Oh, Won't Somebody Listen to the American People?"

I must say I personally find almost as distasteful as the ridiculous Naked Scotty Brown interlude itself the fact that so many Democratic insider-types seemed to think a Senate seat was their private property, "Ted Kennedy's Seat," untouchable. Massachusetts elects Republican governors all the time, where does that kind of complcency come from?

Even now they allow Sarah Palin and Mitch McConnell to quack about how Democrats "aren't listening to the American People" even as majorities of the American people express their clear and loud outrage at the failures to give them what they actually voted for, in part because Republicans aren't listening to any but a miniscule marginal minority of greedy rich people and a noisy scrum of racist-christianist wingnuts.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), on Meet the Press yesterday, said, “the message in Massachusetts was absolutely clear. The exit polls that I looked at said 48 percent of the people in Massachusetts said they voted for the new senator over health care.” McConnell added: “The people are telling us, ‘Please don’t pass this bill.’”

This “referendum” on health reform meme has become near-conventional wisom, with the media and even some Democrats echoing it. But a new Washington Post/Kaiser/Harvard poll undermines this assertion. The poll suggests that while the election was a “protest of the Washington process,” it was not a rejection of progressive policy. Only 11 percent of voters, including 19 percent of Brown voters, want Brown to “stop the Democratic agenda:”

-- 44 percent of voters believe “the country as a whole” would be better off with health care reform, but 23 percent believe Massachusetts would be better off. [No wonder they voted to make it less likely. --d]

-- 58 percent of all voters, including 37 percent of Brown voters, felt “dissatisfied/angry” with “the policies offered by the Republicans in Congress.” [Well, by all means, reward bad behavior if you want to discourage it, er, okay. --d]

I get it that many liberals left small home-towns for the big city and left behind ignorant youths for educations in college or the University of Life, but that doesn't mean the ignorant mean-spirited know-nothing hayseeds you left behind are "The Real America." America grew up, too, America moved to the Big City, too, America got its education, too. This is a secular multicultural nation aspiring for equity in diversity and a social democratic government that works. Republicans are weird stupid intolerant traitors who want to live in a corporatist-militarist-christianist tyranny. Stop being nice to them until they stop behaving like crazy greedy ignorant assholes.